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The Music in It

Saturday, November 26, 2016

This week’s guest blogger is Joe Weil, an old and
dear friend whom I met at Barron Arts Center in 1981. Winner of the 2013
Working People’s Poetry Competition (Partisan Press), Joe is the author of
several full-length books of poetry and chapbooks. Widely published and a noted
performer, he appeared in Bill Moyer’s PBS documentary, “Fooling With Words”
and has been featured in the New York
Times and in notable quotes for the New
Yorker. He is currently a lecturer at Binghamton University. Husband,
father, poet, musician, composer, performer, and teacher, Joe and his wife, the
poet Emily Vogel, live in upstate New York with their children Clare and
Gabriel (Gabriel, whose birthday is December 9th, is my godson). Joe's most recent poetry collection is A Night in Duluth.

Joe’s faith, which has always been an integral part
of his poetry, is eloquently expressed in this Advent reflection that brings
art and spirituality together in prose and poetry that speak to this very
special time of year.

I first posted this
reflection a few years ago, and thought this Advent (which begins tomorrow)

would
be a nice time to revisit it. Thank you, Joe, for sharing with us!

______________________________

From Joe Weil

An Advent
Reflection

In one of my poems I called it “that dark season
where poverty is blessed.” Or something like that. It is literally the season
of early darkness, of least hours of light, though the sun is closer now, and
if, like me, you are a watcher, you will note it is a purer light on those days
when it is cold and the air is clean and clear. The leaves have all fallen. We
can see decay and smell the mulch everywhere. The rocks on my way through the
Delaware water gap are my favorite grey. I always joke with Emily that I can
close my eyes and hear the black bears snoring in their dens of fallen oaks or
small caves and crevices. As we drive through the Gap to go to one of our
readings, I say: “There’s bear up there.”

The bears have gone to sleep—not a true hibernation,
but a modified shutting down of vital signs. On days of false spring they may
even wake for a few hours. They are like us in this respect: dozing, depressed
in the sense of low energy. The message of Advent is: Shemah! Listen. Hear the
weak pulse of life flowing where the water is too swift to freeze. Observe the
pin oaks that do not relinquish all their leaves, and the pines, and the boughs
trembling because a squirrel has just leapt from shade into shade. Christ is
coming. Christ does not come in the obvious place or the obvious light. He is
not in Jerusalem in mid summer. He is in the midst of darkness and poverty. He
comes to say: there is nowhere, not even in all this seeming death that I do
not abide—and abide more richly with my grace. Or as I think my poem on Advent
says: “Despair more deeply into joy.”

Because of my faith, my life is still tied to the
seasons. This wintering cannot mean less to me. I am awake each night to the
stars, and to the rocks. I know what it means to be alone, even in the midst of
my family, and to feel the full madness and beauty of the song “Oh Come, Oh
Come Emanuel.” They don’t sing it very often in my church anymore because we
have become this manically cheerlessly “cheerful” country that treats any deep
and beautiful sadness as if it had cooties. They sing these inferior songs that
have none of the truth of Advent. It is a dark season. Our hearts are broken.
We hunker down and long for something that will console us in our exile from
joy. “Oh Come, Oh Come, Emanuel, and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in
lonely exile here, until the son of God appears. Rejoice! Rejoice! Oh Israel.
To thee shall come Emanuel.”

Rejoice does not mean cheer up. It means to hear the
trickle of water still rushing in the stream. It means to be the thrush in
Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Darkling Thrush:” Joy unlimited (a joy of which Hardy
is unaware). It means to intuit Bethlehem—that nowhere town—and to believe in
the deep cave of one’s being that something good, something to redeem us can
abide there—in the dark, not in spite of it. To see Bethlehem and know its
worth is the whole of Advent: this little place of poverty, this nothing town
in the shadow of Jerusalem. If we were going to quote Williams: “this star that
shines alone in the sunrise towards which it lends no part.” It is the light
lit from within that the world can not teach us to see. Grace is there. It is
what Whitman meant when he said he preferred the air to its perfumed
distillation:

“The atmosphere is not a perfume ... it has no taste
of the distillation.... it is odorless. it is for my mouth forever... I am in
love with it,/ I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and
naked./ I am mad for it to be in contact with me.”

This is a great poet defining his own Bethlehem—the
little place where poverty, where the not distilled and free air of the naked
and visible is blessed.

So, for me, Advent is a season of being ambushed by
grace. I stay watchful and yet am ambushed. I am alert yet am taken unaware.
God shows me my blindness. God grants me the dark I need to know what light I
have dismissed. Today my wife is getting the lights and I am hanging them. When
I was little, I loved the way the cold air gave the lights a halo. I was made
for it as Walt suggests. I am still mad for it. My poem “Christmas 1977” was
written when my mom had been dead almost a year, and we all thought it was
going to be a terrible Christmas, but our love and mutual grief made it one of
the best Christmas Eves I ever had:

Christmas 1977

By Joe Weil

Here,
where it is always Bethlehem

grimy
and grieved—a slum lord’s kind of town,

I
watch old Mrs. Suarez string her lights

against
the common vespers of despair.

I
watch her nimbly snub the cold night’s air,

thwarting
a fall into the snow ball bush

beside
which Mary calmly stomps the skull

of
Satan. Look! Her lights are coming on.

Blue
with white specks where the paint has chipped

and
yellow, green, all rising to full glow

big
gumdrop lights draped from post to post,

haloed
where their heat meets the cold.

And
something in me tears or has been torn

a
long, long time though I have read Rimbaud,

and
have been known to chew on my own spleen

and
spend an evening jesting at such a God.

Something
in me tears and will not mend.

Take
up this broken hymn and sing it there

for
Mrs. Suarez wobbly and infirm,

who,
soon, will be too old to climb her chair.

For
her I hang this broken Christmas hymn—

here,
where it is always Bethlehem.

___________________________________

This Week's Prompt

For your prompt this week, write a poem (using Joe's poem as inspiration) about a particular Christmas or any other winter holiday that holds a particular place in your memory. If you observe the Advent season, try writing about this time of year.

Saturday, November 19, 2016

Thanksgiving will take place this coming week
and is a day set aside here in the United States (other countries have similar
days) to remember and give thanks—it's a time when families and friends gather, a celebration of sharing, community, and gratitude.

For this prompt, I invite you to write a poem
about something for which you are grateful. It’s so easy to fall into the habit
of grumbling about what we don’t have, miss, need, etc., that this is a great
time to take a step back and acknowledge the gifts and blessings that we have
in our lives. Instead of focusing on deficits, let’s focus on abundances.

A form that lends itself to this prompt is the kyrielle.
Once very popular, the kyrielle originated in France, dates to the Middle Ages,
and takes its name from kyrie (found in many Christian liturgies). Many hymn
lyrics were written in this form, but kyrielle content is not limited to religious
subjects. A traditional kyrielle is often short, octosyllabic (each line
contains eight syllables), and is typically presented in four-line stanzas. A
traditional kyrielle also contains a refrain (a repeated line, phrase, or word)
at the end of each stanza.

Guidelines:

1. Begin by thinking about things for which
you're grateful. Think in terms of particulars and details—not ideas, but
specifics (i.e., not love, but an example of love that you've known; not
friendship, but a particular friend).

2. Think of places in which you've been
especially thankful (the “geography of thanks”). Think of the people who were
part of the story.

3. Write a few ideas for “thankful” refrains
(repeated line, phrase, or word) before you begin writing the poem. You may
want to use this refrain in your poem.

4. Write a quatrain (four-line stanza) about a
particular thing for which you're thankful. Each line should contain eight
syllables. If you wish, you may create a rhyme scheme. The last line, phrase,
or word in your first stanza will become your refrain.

5. You may write about one thing for which
you're grateful, or each quatrain may be about individual things that have
inspired your gratitude.

Tips:

1. Remember that with all formal poems nowadays,
it is vital that the form does not “drive” your poem.If the form begins to feel forced or unwieldy, you may
switch to something less deliberate (i.e., free verse, prose poem).

2. There is no limit to the number of stanzas a
kyrielle may have, but three is the generally accepted minimum. So … your poem
should be at least three stanzas long.

3. Try to work with a rhyme scheme —a good way
to exercise your poetic muscles. However, if rhyming isn’t your thing, go with
what works best for you.

4. The kyrielle is exceptionally versatile, and
you can have a lot of fun experimenting with this prompt. Just keep in mind
that the theme and tone of your poems should be thankfulness.

5. If the kyrielle doesn’t appeal to you, feel
free to write your “thankful” poem in any form that you wish!

Saturday, November 5, 2016

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought, and the thought has
found words.

— Robert Frost

Emotion is poetry can be a tricky thing that begs
the question, “How does a poet convey genuine emotion without being ‘emotional’
or sentimental?”

This week’s challenge will be to write a poem in
which you convey an emotion without stating what that emotion is. In other
words, your poem will show rather than tell the emotion.

Guidelines:

1. Think about a time in your life that was
characterized by a high level of emotional response (e.g., marriage, birth of a
child, divorce, death of a loved one).

2. Return to that time in memory. What did you feel
(joy, happiness, love, anger, depression, frustration, insecurity, loneliness,
grief)? How did you express your emotion? What other people were involved? What were others’
reactions to the emotional trigger? What exactly happened (not an emotional
interpretation—just the facts)? How did the emotional time return to normal?
Are there lingering effects even now?

3. Begin by asking yourself what you want your poem
to “do.” Where do you want it to go? You might make a few notes of things you
want to include. Importantly, what do you want your readers to fee when they
read your poem?

4. Begin writing by setting a time, season, and/or
place, and then move your poem forward.

5. After you have completed several drafts,
experiment with a stanza pattern (3, 4, or 6 lines in each stanza—don't do this
too early in the writing process or you may find yourself writing to
accommodate the stanza plan rather than the poem’s meaning).

6. After you’ve written what feels like a complete
poem, set the poem aside for a few days. When you come back to it, think about
what the poem doesn’t need and remove rather than add. most importantly, is
there any overstated emotion that you can work out of the poem?

Tips:

Try to write in the active, not the passive, voice.
To do that, it can be helpful to remove “ing” endings and to write in the
present tense (this will also create a greater sense of immediacy).

If you're writing a poem about a time that you were angry, remember that this isn't a rant poem. Instead, examine the memory of an angry time and to show it as it was without telling it overtly.

WELCOME!

THE MUSIC IN IT

"The Music In It" is a blog for anyone interested in poets and poetry—the craft and the community.

The title comes from Countee Cullen, who wrote: "My poetry, I should think, has become the way of my giving out whatever music is in me."

Look for a new prompt or guest blogger every week or every other week, usually posted on Saturdays, and check the archives for older prompts and posts. Be sure to click on the poetry-related links in the sidebar.

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I’ve worked as a guest poet for numerous agencies, have twice been a featured reader in the Dodge Poetry Festival, and my awards include two poetry fellowships from the NJ State Arts Council, the 2012 International Book Award for Poetry, and the Distinguished Alumni Award (Kean University). My book, A LIGHTNESS, A THIRST, OR NOTHING AT ALL, is a 2016 Paterson Prize finalist. In March of 2012, I was appointed Poet Laureate of Fanwood, NJ by the Borough Mayor and Council.
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ON THE TIP OF YOUR TONGUE

Ever find yourself in the middle of a poem and unable to find that one perfect word? Here's the link for a site that provides synonyms, antonyms, related words, similar sounding words, and much more. Easy to use!